Industrial Relations Glossary - Marx's Theory of Exploitation
- Maria Pauline Moises
- Nov 12, 2021
- 4 min read
Marx's Theory of Exploitation discusses about the issue if labour is a commodity and how workers who sell their labour power and how industries uses their skills and talents to produce goods and services in the market that sometimes lead to exploitation and abused in power. In this segment, we will show how each word is related to the Marx's Theory of Exploitation.
Bourgeoisie - bourgeoisie is individuals with the capability to obtain capital in order to produce goods and services. Among the three IR actors, they are typically labeled as the employers who contract workers for wages. They are also called the modern bourgeoisie because of their capacity to incur capital.
Photo of a French female bourgeoisie from the 1780's
Marx, K & F. Engels. (1969). Communist Manifesto. In Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One. Moscow: Progress Publishers. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Commodities - commodities are goods and services that are valuable to a person. A commodity is either of use-value which is subjective to the preference of buyer and exchange value which depends on labor-time allotted to the product or service. This is commonly used in market situations wherein a seller sells a good or service that satisfies the want of the buyer.
Gold is an example of a high-value commodity. This is due to the extensive labor-time allotted by workers to mine, mold, and polish to create a single gold bar.
Marx, K. (1959). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Progress Publishers.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economyhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economyhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/
Communism - communism is an ideology that believes that the ideal system is where all are equal and that there are no private properties that result to social inequality between the classes. Lands are communally owned and benefits are shared. The government remains as the central authority that controls land and property instead of private owners.
Famous communist leaders include: Kim Il Sung, Vladmir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong
National Geographic Society. (2020, July 30). Communism. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/communism/
Marx, K & F. Engels. (1969). Communist Manifesto. In Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. One. Moscow: Progress Publishers. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
Exploitation - It is a type of slavery that may be applied to people of all kinds coming from any race, age, gender, nationality who receives unethical and inhumane treatment and receive improperly and lacking benefits or worse, nothing in return, resulting in starvation, poverty, inequality and low quality of life.
Photo of a child working in a metal scraps;
Photo Credits to UNICEFhttps://www.unicef.org/rosa/what-we-do/child-protection/child-labour-and-exploitation
DeltaNet: What are the Different Types of Modern Slavery? (2019, September 4)
Price - it refers to how much you are willing to give up in exchange for goods and services. It is the cost required to gain possession of something and computed in terms of money. We can infer from the theory of value by Adam Smith & David Ricardo that price is composed of the dead & living labor as well as the production cost including the time to create the products or render the services.
Lumen (n.d). Introduction to Price.
Proletariat - defined as the lower class in the society that the main source of income was derived from the sale of their labor power. The bourgeoisie takes advantage of this class by paying them the lowest possible wages to maximize their profit. This creates an unfair imbalance between social classes that refers to labor exploitation.
Women workers protest in Petrograd in 1917 source Redflag Women, class and the Bolsheviks | Red Flag
The Investopedia Team (2021, October 29). Marxism: Theory, Effects, and Examples.
Socialism - socialism is an ideology for economic, social, and political framework, in which production of all kinds of instruments and other means to create commodities, properties, and natural resources is under social control. It opposes the concept of Capitalism in which properties and resources are being owned privately. Marx and Engels have been proposing this type of theory even before revolutions in industrial relations.
Karl Marx (left) and Freidrich Engels (right) who wrote were the advocators of Socialism and have written the perspective of Socialism in Communist Manifesto. Photo Credits idcommunism.com http://www.idcommunism.com/2016/08/karl-marx-friedrich-engels-manifesto-of.html
Socialism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Jul 15, 2019 https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism/#SociCapi
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Manifesto February 1848; Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1987, 2000 Chapter III. Socialist and Communist Literature
Socially Necessary Labor Time (SNLT) - it is the time spent by the workers to produce products or services given the normal state of productivity for a given society including the average skills & general intensity of labor in the society. The higher the individual labor-time needed in the production than the SNLT, the lesser will demand it, since market competition works by lower SNLT & cheaper exchange value.
Moseley, F. (n.d.). Marx’s Theory Of Value And Money: A Critique Of Reuten’s ‘Value-Form’ Interpretation Of Part 1 Of Volume 1 Of Capital. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~fmoseley/Working_Papers_PDF/measure.pdf
Wage - It refers to all remuneration given by the employer in exchange for work rendered by an employee for a certain period. According to Karl Marx, labor is merely a commodity the laborers trade their services in exchange for a minimum wage. His Surplus Value Theory states that the excess product or surplus value that was created due to forced labor would be claimed by the capitalist or the owner.
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